For but a moment more did we struggle with our outnumbering opponents there, and then as they gripped and held the four of us helpless and jerked our heads up wild cries came from them as they saw the faces of us, saw that two of us were their own guards! Then the next moment, needing no other explanation of what had happened, they turned with their own black-garbed fellows, rushed out of the cell, slamming shut its door behind them, down the corridor and toward the cage-lifts after Connell and Macklin! We heard those cries re-echoed swiftly over all the mighty building, heard rushing feet and repeated calls on the levels of the great tower above and beneath us. And then, as we flung ourselves to our window, gazed downward, we saw in the next moment two green-garbed tiny figures issuing from the giant electrostatic tower's base far beneath us, running across the great plaza toward the nearest of the cruisers. They were Connell and Macklin! I cried out with Hilliard hoarse words of encouragement, forgetful that none could hear from our terrific height, saw Connell and Macklin rushing up the slender gangplank in the cruiser's side and through its open door, saw that door slam shut behind them, just as from the base of the tower there poured out after them a flood of pursuing green-garbed figures. Those pursuers were raising their heat-pistols, and a hail of shining heat-cartridges were flying through the air toward the cruiser in the next moment, but as they shot toward it there came faintly up to us the droning of the ship's great motors and then with all the power of those motors in its vertical lifting tube-propellers it was rising upward, was lifting smoothly and swiftly upward toward us! And at the same moment the green-uniformed crowd of guards beneath were rushing across the plaza toward the other resting cruisers, were rushing within them to soar up after Connell and Macklin! Up toward us shot the lifting cruiser of our two friends, though, up toward our little window, for such had been our plan by which two, escaping, might rescue the remaining two. But as it shot upward I looked down, saw beneath the scores of cruisers on the plaza rising now after it, heard through all the great tower and for far around it a great roar of rising shouts as the escape was discovered, saw the giant gleaming muzzles of the great batteries of heat-guns around the plaza turning swiftly upward on their pivots toward the rising cruiser of Connell and Macklin! And so the next moment as that cruiser shot up toward us, as I made out Macklin plain in its transparent-windowed bridge-room, driving it up toward us, I flung an arm outward from the tower to him, shouting in frenzied appeal. "Back, Macklin!" I cried, with Hilliard crying too beside me. "No time to get us--_back home with Connell, for God's sake_!"